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About four days after pregnant mom Poonam Litt went missing, her spectacularly unconcerned sister-in-law Mandeep Punia was being interviewed by Peel police.

Litt was married to her brother, Manjinder, and they all lived together in the same Brampton house with her parents, children and her spouse, Skinder Punia. Manjinder and their mother had gone to India for a wedding, leaving Litt home with their two-year-old daughter.

In her recorded police interview on Feb. 9, 2009, Punia insisted there was no tension between them and she was “like sisters” with her brother’s wife.

But no, she never called police when she disappeared.

Litt, 27, failed to show up on Feb. 5 at a nearby dental office where she worked as a receptionist. Punia was the last one to see her alive. She told police her sister-in-law had returned home from work the previous evening, gave her two-year-old daughter a bottle, and then went to sleep.

The following morning, Punia said she dropped her eldest son off at school and came home to shower. Just before 9 a.m., she said, Litt came to her bedroom door with her daughter in her arms and said she was going to walk to work.

“Sister, hold her,” Punia recalled being told before Litt left.

She put on a video game for her niece so she wouldn’t cry. About 45 minutes later, Punia said she received a call from the dental office. Litt was supposed to open for the day but had never shown up.

Dr. Roopali Sharma told the court she arrived around 9:30 a.m. to find her office still locked and her assistant waiting outside. When she called Litt’s home, a woman told her she’d left at 9 a.m. “I was just thinking it was very abnormal that she still hadn’t reached the office,” the dentist recalled. “It was an extremely, extremely cold morning. I was concerned that she hadn’t reached the office.”

When Litt still failed to arrive, Sharma said she called back and suggested her family call police. In her interview, Punia said they decided instead to wait for her return. “She’ll come. We just kept waiting.”

Peel Regional Police Const. Neil Harris was tasked with reviewing hours of surveillance video from a home just a few doors away from where Litt supposedly left. He told the jury the recording showed no foot traffic — and specifically no female pedestrian — between 8:45 a.m. and 10 a.m. on Feb. 5, 2009.

But there was footage of what appears to be Punia’s van leaving just before 1 a.m. and returning three hours later.

In their opening statement, Crowns Kelly Slate and Keeley Holmes alleged that after an argument on her return from work the night of Feb. 4, Punia stabbed Litt and her father, Kulwant, and husband, Skinder, then loaded the body into their van and disposed of it in a remote wooded area in Caledon. Punia was charged with second-degree murder. Both men were charged with being an accessory after the fact. Punia’s husband is being tried with her; the jury was told her father, who’s expected to testify against them, will have a separate trial.

Five months after Litt vanished, Punia and her husband were interviewed for a second time. RCMP Staff-Sgt. Baltej Dhillon, who speaks Punjabi, asked her a pointed question: If this was the first time Litt had ever gone missing, “Why did it take you so long to call the police?”

Punia insisted she had to mind the children. Her husband said he thought it would be “insulting” if the police were seen arriving at their house so they planned to go to the station themselves after he finished work.

For three years, the mystery of Litt’s whereabouts remained. And then owners of the Caledon property stumbled upon her skull in February 2012. And what of her little girl?

“She cries bitterly. Her condition worsens,” Punia told Peel police just days after her sister-in-law’s disappearance.

Her concern for her motherless niece was less apparent on that fatal night, the Crown alleged.

“Mandeep stabbed Poonam in the neck with a box cutter, while Poonam was holding her daughter in her arms,” Holmes told the jury. “Kulwant washed off (the baby) who was covered in her mother’s blood.”

Accused killer never reported pregnant mom missing

About four days after pregnant mom Poonam Litt went missing, her spectacularly unconcerned sister-in-law Mandeep Punia was being interviewed by Peel police.

Litt was married to her brother, Manjinder, and they all lived together in the same Brampton house with her parents, children and her spouse, Skinder Punia. Manjinder and their mother had gone to India for a wedding, leaving Litt home with their two-year-old daughter.

In her recorded police interview on Feb. 9, 2009, Punia insisted there was no tension between them and she was “like sisters” with her brother’s wife.

But no, she never called police when she disappeared.

Litt, 27, failed to show up on Feb. 5 at a nearby dental office where she worked as a receptionist. Punia was the last one to see her alive. She told police her sister-in-law had returned home from work the previous evening, gave her two-year-old daughter a bottle, and then went to sleep.